CF Stories

Community foundations of all sizes and types benefit from shared knowledge, and from accessing data and tools that enable better decision-making. The CF Insights team works to bring relevant knowledge to the field, and is focused on helping each community foundation and the field leverage our resources to strengthen performance and community impact.

As a mid-sized community with 11 FTEs, The Dallas Foundation felt understaffed. CF Insights’ data reinforced the feeling with facts.

Using CF Insights' peer selection tool, The Dallas Foundation created a peer group of foundations with similar asset size and composition. The comparative data revealed that Dallas had fewer FTEs than their peers. With data in hand, Dallas went to its board and was successful in making the case to hire an additional staff member in a tight economy.

Has your board or management team recently wondered what other foundations are doing or how they operate? CF Insights benchmarking data can help!

The Community Foundation of Greater New Britain, a relatively young organization, conducted the Activity Based Costing Analysis and compared their results to peers to understand the strengths, weaknesses, and implicit choices built into their current operating model.

Following this close look at their current operations, they began scenario planning to forecast how changes in their foundation's asset levels, donor behavior and staffing structure would impact their economic reality. This forecast was built on feedback from peer learning groups as well as comparative data on staffing, expenses, and giving ratios. Results of the model informed discussions about grant support for additional FTEs from a local private foundation that will help enhance the foundation’s community leadership work.

Several community foundations around the US picked up on the rankings, promoting their community's generosity in terms of gifts per capita or gift and grant activity. Leveraging what worked, other CFs followed their lead. Explore different options for press release messages. (DOC, 41KB)

"CF Insights has been a real lifesaver for us. Membership is absolutely worth it! Everybody needs to contribute data because the more data that is in the database, the more we can compare ourselves.”"